Pfenning's Organic Farms in New Hamburg, Ontario, employs Canadians and Jamaican migrant farm workers to work its fields and packing warehouse. The owners would like to see its Jamaican workers afforded better pathways to becoming permanent residents and have open work permits that give workers the ability to easily change employers. Jim Rankin/Toronto Star

Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino says the Liberal government’s new agri-food pilot program will help build resilience in the agriculture sector, which sees tens of thousands of jobs go unfilled each year.

He made the comments during a Friday afternoon teleconference meeting of the House agriculture committee, just one week after pilot applications opened. Mendicino said the program, which creates a path to citizenship for foreign workers, will ensure Canadians can still access safe and healthy food, while preparing the agriculture sector to withstand future shocks.

“I think that the way we create that resiliency is by continuing to measure our success in this program and to measure our needs within the economy,” he said. “Particularly when it comes to the labour shortages that we see on our farms, the labour shortages that we see among seafood workers and to leverage the opportunities with those who are abroad…who want to come and put their shoulder to the wheel.”

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said the pilot will accept 2,750 applications annually to help employers in meat processing, and mushroom and greenhouse production. Mendicinoacknowledged that temporary foreign workers are an “often overlooked group” of workers who are vital to Canada’s food security, and said the three-year pilot will play an important role in restarting Canada’s economy post the coronavirus pandemic.

Foreign workers fill an important role in the Canadian agriculture sector, where 59,000 positions went unfilled last year, according to a study from the Senate committee on agriculture and forestry. The report found that the number of unfilled positions could hit 114,000 by 2025.

The hearing comes weeks after COVID-19-induced border restrictions were loosened to allow Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW) into the country to work in the agriculture sector. Mendicino said 22,000 temporary workers arrived in Canada in April to work in the agriculture and agri-food sector as part of the government’s travel exemptions.

In New Brunswick, where the provincial government has so far banned entrance for TFWs, the National Farmers Union and other farm groups surveyed 18 farms and found that about 2,000 acres will go unplanted due to the labour shortage, resulting in a $7 million in loss to those farms.

NDP MP Alastair MacGregor also noted that agriculture and agri-food would be an economic driver post-COVID-19, but said groups like Canadian Food and Beverage Association are projecting a shortage of 65,000 skilled workers by 2025. He wondered what incentives the government has to ensure a skilled labour force, noting that some jobs may require more skilled workers, with farms moving to automated equipment that need to be operated.

While the pilot seeks to bring workers to Canada permanently, Mendicino said the Temporary Foreign Worker Program — which allows Canadian employers to hire foreign nationals to fill temporary labour and skill shortages when qualified Canadian citizens or permanent residents are not available — will remain a lever to align labour shortages to skills abroad, as the federal government has done with farming and food security.

“I believe that is something that will be very much a part of our ability to recover after we are on the other side of COVID-19,” he said.

MacGregor also noted that the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, Canada’s largest coalition of self-organized groups of migrant workers which fights for justice, raised concerns that the agri-food pilot gives too much leeway to employers, and that education and language requirements are too stringent to be accessible for foreign labourers.

Mendicino said the three-year pilot is an experiment by definition and that the federal government is open to ways they can improve the program and “ensure that it’s meeting the objective of recognizing those contributions — the value of the work on farms when it comes to food security — by providing a clear way [migrant workers] can establish permanent residency in Canada.”